Though my truck’s a wreck, the front end doesn’t look all that bad.
There’s a slim chance the stereo still works.
Blue smoke, sad eyes. The smell of fresh blood and motor oil.
“Did you know?” I ask her.
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I tried. You wouldn’t listen.”
Silence but for a faint dripping from somewhere behind me. Then, somewhere in the trees behind Kyle, a catbird does its impression of a hungry infant. I look toward the sound and see a flicker of dark gray, then nothing but green trapping the sunlight.
“What I’m going to do…will it be enough?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Can’t or won’t.”
“Can’t. And even if I could, I wouldn’t.”
“Why?”
“Knowin’ what lies ahead can’t change you, or make anythin’ better no more than dwellin’ on the past will. You’ve always done what your gut’s told you to. You’ve never been a great listener to the voice of your heart, not because you’re a bad man, but because you’re not wired that way. It doesn’t speak to you in words you understand, and that’s just how it is.”
I respond with a soft, bitter laugh. “So I can blame this
“Would Kyle have been happy if he’d sold you out, and got out of Milestone? Would you, in his shoes? Neither of us can see what would have become of him. He wanted out; he got it. He listened to the voice of
“And what is my voice telling me to do now? Can you hear it?”
“No. But it doesn’t matter if I tell you it’s the wrong or right way, you won’t listen. All that’s left is to see this through.”
“Hey,” I say, clearing my throat and scratching at my scalp—my way of letting her know I can’t discuss this anymore.
“I know.”
I wave away her mindreading and scowl. “Well for Chrissakes just let me say it anyway.”
“You don’t know how.”
“Then can I say I love you?”
The smoke curls into a smile. “Yes.”
“Will you buy it if I do?”
“Maybe.”
“I love you.”
“What about Iris?”
“Don’t start.”
“Get goin’ Tom. Do what needs to be done.”
“Wait.” I haven’t turned off the radio, haven’t told her to leave me alone, but when I search for her face, she’s gone, curlicues of blue smoke drifting on the breeze from the open car door. I watch it fade until only the memory of her is left, and the sad fact that when I told her I loved her, she didn’t respond in kind.
The sun’s high in the sky and glaring like the eye of a dragon by the time someone comes. We haven’t moved, Kyle and me. We’re still just sitting, and catching up on old times, though of course I’m doing all the talking, and I figure I must have been staring right back at that big old sun because there are white orbs wherever I look, even when I shut my eyes.
This car is a familiar one. It’s going too slow to present much of a threat, but in this town, who knows? There are no miracles in Milestone. Plenty of murderers, though.
The car stops a few feet away, and it’s a woman that gets out.
“Tom?”
“Iris.” I’m glad to see her, but I’m guessing she won’t know that by the look on my face, so maybe I’d better tell her. “Guess your magical power of screwing up electricity doesn’t extend to car batteries, huh?”
“Or telephones, or hairdryers. What happened?” She’s blocking the light now, her shadow cool and welcome across my sunburned face. It gives her a red halo.
I fill her in on the details, laughing my way through some of it, blubbering my way through more, and listening to the rest as if it isn’t coming from my mouth at all.
In the end it comes down to a litany of who’s dead, an out-loud reading of tomorrow’s obituaries. Iris is quiet through it all, and if she’s upset as I reckon she should be seeing Kyle lying here lifeless at the side of the road, I can’t hear it in her voice.
“C’mon,” she says. “We gotta get you home.”
“I’m not going home.”
“Where then?”
“Your place. Just for a little while. I need to rest.”
I expect her to ask questions, and there are certainly plenty of them, but we both know my son’s body’s got to be loaded into her car, so we say nothing more until the job is done and we’re on our way back to town.
“What are you goin’ to do?” she asks me, her voice laced with concern.
My eyes are closed; exhaustion’s taking me away from all this to a cool dark place where there’s only me, no one else, no angels with red hair or devils with no eyes. Just me. But I have energy enough to satisfy her curiosity as Cadaver satisfied mine, even though the dark wings of sleep have wrapped themselves around me and are already spiriting me away.
“Kill Gracie.”
Chapter Eighteen
Brody closes his eyes. His jaw aches something terrible, and he suspects his nose is broken. His breath whistles through the coagulating blood. Still, all things considered he reckons he could be a lot worse off. He’s still free, after all. There aren’t any sirens sundering the air, no thundering cavalcade he could never outrun on foot. The maddening chorus of birdsong drills into his eardrums and he kicks at the high grass, roars at the source of the noise, but that only makes his head hurt more, so he shuts them out, massages his jaw, and keeps walking. He’s heading out of town, tired, and sore, and on foot, but sooner or later a goddamn car has to pass this way and give him a ride.
He wipes his sleeve across his nose, winces and grunts with pain.
“Goddamn sonofabitch.” The guy got him good, there’s no denying that. In his haste to be away from the whatever-the-hell-it-was that came crawling out of the Sheriff’s car radio, he hadn’t thought of the big black guy, hadn’t considered that there might still be enough strength left in him to get in his way. But there was, and he did, and the fist Brody ran into was like a brick wall.
Worse than being knocked out by a burned-up giant he hadn’t had the sense to look out for though, is the fact that they tricked him. The Sheriff should be dead and Brody three states away by now, but the Sheriff knew what he was doing when he turned on that stereo, and all Wintry had to do was step up to the plate. Now they’re gone, and though he knows where to find them, and vengeance demands he do that very thing, he’s letting it go. There isn’t time; he’s wasted enough of that on these hicks.
He needs a car, and fast, and it’s only when he stops looking over his shoulder at the quiet road a mile and a half later that he realizes he’s been looking in the wrong place. To his right, through the trees surrounding a narrow overgrown path, is a small quaint little cabin. Smoke drifts from the chimney. There’s some kind of a
